Friday, July 8, 2016

The Concept of 'Sacrifice'

I once watched a video of Sifu Freddie Lee mentioning the word 'sacrifice'. He basically defined sacrificing as giving up what you want to do to achieve success, lose weight or whatever. He cannot be any more right about that. I am experiencing this everyday: people are willing to do anything to be "successful". Here is the problem with sacrificing. It uses the mind to be successful. You cannot avoid using the mind if you want to get somewhere. You can be meditative as much as you can but to be successful, you have to ambitious in some ways. That is the deception of these so-called motivational videos. They are trying to get people to be more ambitious, more competitive, more cunning. Now, if I say this to a Westerner he might look at me and say: "Do you not ambitions yourself? Are you not as competitive as the rest of us?" In this world, competition is really hard to escape from. To get bread, you have to be in some sort of competition whether you want to be or not. I am going to sound kind of arrogant when I say this, but the difference between me and other people is that I have more awareness of this competitive energy. Because I put meditation first, I can never be controlled by competition. I already know competition is an illusion; however, the rest of the population see competition as reality! On top of that, they are willing to sacrifice friends, family in order to reach success. In other words, love is no longer important in their lives; success is, ambition is. That is where "duties" or "responsibilities" comes along. Speaking of duty, I once watched one of Osho's lecture. He mentioned that the word 'duty' is one of the most dirtiest words ever. He even discourage people from doing anything out of responsibility because doing so is not really from the heart, it's from reluctance. Anything you do should be out of love. I see it the same way. Any action performed only toward success. Someone who truly knows the know do not refrain from things like alcohol, drugs, television, or whatever by sacrifice. He refrains from it because he truly does not want to be a part of any of these energy draining activities. He will live a balanced life, which is the ultimate way of life.